History of the project

The dog tracker project (initially called Spotty) was created by Ekaterina Sedinina as a spin-off from her main telecoms business. At the working prototype stage, the project was presented to a Slovak investment fund, which ultimately decided to come on board. In 2015, the project was restarted with the focus on international markets and under a new name — Mishiko.

Manager Matus Horak took an interest in the project mainly because he is a keen dog-owner himself. “We always had dogs in our family,” Matus explains. “We bought our first dog when I was 3 years old so I know very well what it means to lose your pet. Unfortunately, I lost one of my dogs. I now have two Golden Retrievers and they are real members of the family. So as not to lose them, I wanted a GPS dog tracker, and not just a location tracker but an activity tracker as well. I was into sport at a professional level and wanted to monitor my dog’s activity while out walking—not to mention having a chance to find dog-owners in the neighbourhood and get to know them. But no such product existed that met my specification.”

Undeterred, Matus, a successful manager with experience in e-commerce and marketing, continued his search for GPS dog trackers. Scouring the media, he came across a Russian team offering a prototype of his ideal device. The Spotty project as it was known happened to be looking for a partner to enter the international market. After a series of meetings and discussions, Matus and Ekaterina Sedinina decided to join forces and rebrand the project not as a single unit but as a whole range of IoT devices called Mishiko (after the nickname of Matus’s lost dog — Misha).

The Mishiko collar, one of the most advanced dog trackers on the market, is the first of these devices.